Author: tourneygeek

With my co-conspirator Butch Meese (the dean of bracket constructors for backgammon in the midwest), I’ve been working on something rather unusual for possible use in an upcoming tournament. It bend the rules of bracket-building in a number of ways, and illustrates innovative approaches to a few awkward problems.

Regular readers may have noticed that tourneygeek has, of late, been rather long on background concepts and philosophizing, and short on the empirical analysis of tournament designs. There’s a backlog of empirical work that I’ve promised, but not delivered, including fairness (D) and the analysis of partially-seeded brackets.

The reason for this is that I’m in the process of overhauling my tourney simulator – this time, rewriting it from scratch on a new platform. My past efforts have been coded in an admirable little language called Chipmunk Basic. Chipmunk is endearingly similar to some of the simpler languages that were in use some 35 years ago when I first learned to program. But my simulator has grown to well over 200 lines, and had accumulated a lot of the sludge that’s the real dirt in quick-and-dirty coding. I’d begun to dread wading into it to add new features. So it was time to overhaul it anyway, and I figured that this time I’d take the trouble to use a real integrated development environment. And this has meant finally learning the basic tidiness expected of real programmers.

So, I’ve been in programming boot camp for the last few days, starting, as tradition demands, by writing a “Hello World!” application. It will be a few days more before I know enough to recreate my simulator. But soon I’ll catch up on the empirical work I’ve promised, and forge ahead with more.

So, sorry for the delay, but watch this space for new and better tournament analyses soon.

Yesterday’s post discussed why backgammon bots are widely suspected of cheating. It assumed that we know what cheating is. In that context, perhaps we do. But the concept of cheating can be a difficult one, not least because there no issue in the world of games and tournaments that’s so emotionally charged as cheating.

The word “cheating” has a special valence for games players. It is so strongly negative that most people avoid using it, at least until it’s clear that there will be no more games to play that day. People bend over backwards to find some other way to characterize the behavior they object to, and they’re usually wise to do so.

It is especially dangerous, then, that the word’s meaning is unclear. For some, cheating includes any willful breach of a game’s rules, or even of the background rules that constitute sportsmanship. At the other extreme, some hold that nothing is cheating if you don’t get caught.

One of the substantial divisions of opinion with respect to what constitutes cheating is whether the verb “to cheat” can be used intransitively. The test for this is whether it makes any sense to you to talk of cheating at solitaire.

The backgammon world has been changed forever by the arrival of strong neural net backgammon programs, or “bots”, which play the game at a very high level. The best of these is Extreme Gammon, but there are a number of others that also play well, if not quite infallibly.

In this post, I’ll discuss some of these changes, with particular attention to the curious fact that all of the better bots are routinely accused of cheating.

In Skill and Luck in Backgammon, I described the process by which I settled on the parameters tourneygeek should use to simulate backgammon tournaments. The result was that the luck factor should be set to three, which implies that backgammon is 75% luck, and only 25% skill.

This does not mean, however, that backgammon is an easy game – a game in which a few small, easily learned heuristics will allow you to play at a high level. Open any of the many more advanced monographs on backgammon strategy and tactics, and you’ll soon see that there’s an enormous body of knowledge that expert players have and others do not. There’s plenty of skill in backgammon, it’s just that this skill is regularly overwhelmed because there’s even more luck.

How do players learn the game under these conditions? This post will examine two reasons that the high degree of luck makes good backgammon difficult to learn.

In defining “sport”, I’m mindful of the fact that it seems to be desirable to characterize an activity as a sport – so much so that there’s a distinct tendency for games with any physical component to claim to be sports. And even games with no obvious physical component, like chess, show an increasing tendency to characterize themselves as “mind sports”, and to dream some day of having their claim to sport-hood ratified by being included in the Olympics.

Thus, I’ve reconsidered my initial inclination to define “sport” strictly as a subset of “game”, knowing that would only enrage the practitioners of anything I didn’t admit to the pantheon of sport. But I still think there’s a useful distinction to be made between sports that are, and those that are not, games.

Though there are, as usual, difficult cases where the classification is arguable, I think it’s helpful to consider two kinds of sports that are not really games: artistic sports, and nature sports.

In Playing Games, I offered a definition of game playing as the pursuit of arbitrarily-assigned value. In this post, I’ll offer a definition of the closely-related word “sport”.

Briefly, a sport is an activity that, like a game, is constrained by rules and limitations, and for which one of those limitations is a natural limitation on some extreme aspect of the player’s physical performance.

Most, but not all, sports are also games – I’ll explore the world of non-game sports presently.